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cuboniks, the xenofeminist manifesto

written 20240103.

if nature is unjust, change nature! this manifesto argues for the use of, or the appropriation of, technology as a means of facing up to global capitalism, and abolishing the binary gender system.

xenofeminism positions itself against what it calls “admirable, but insufficent struggles bound to fixed localities and fragmented insurrections,” seeing these as unable to move beyond a temporary and defensive posture. instead it seeks to face the demands of global complexity, transitioning across multiple levels of political, material and conceptual organisation.

the manifesto argues for a feminism at ease with computation, capable of repurposing technology and digital platforms to address specifically gendered issues, for example, harrassment and doxxing.

xenofeminism is antinatural and gender abolitionist, not in the sense of eradicating gender, but as a “shorthand for the ambition to construct a society where traits currently assembled under the rubric of gender, no longer furnish a grid for the asymmetric operation of power.” in this respect, it converges with other forms of emancipatory abolitionism towards a common horizon of class abolition.

this is the point where the manifesto really opens up for me, personally. (i might have some bias.) xenofeminism is a politics for alienation in that it is seeking to restore a sense of the world’s volatility and artificiality, to push back against the rubric of gender as a “plural but static constellation of gender identities” that is in some way natural, or given. against this, it evocatively describes transition as an “arduous assertion of freedom against an order that seemed immutable.” i adore this, of course.

things take off from here and the manifesto roams across several arena, both virtual and material: intervention into the built environment, liberating reproductive labour and domestic life through economic reconfiguration, and, what caught my attention, the “articulation of a proactive politics for biotechnical intervention and hormones.” for the last, the manifesto raises the possibility of open-source wetware, an extension of existing diy-hrt and gender hacking practices to parallel movements in the software world.